Milk&Kisses
by pansybud
Summary: a shameless love story, written with the cocteau twins album of the same name. content warning! abuse, abuse of a mentally ill person, intimated sexual abuse
1. Violaine

He didn't expect to attach to the team he was assigned, though, admittedly, having never been a part of a team before - not even a peripheral part - he hadn't been able to anticipate the psychic dynamics of interdependence.

He had planned to compensate for his ignorance - he had prepared contingencies for containing whatever soft feeling could occur - only, he hadn't anticipated that one. He hadn't imagined, he reflected later, that the world he had considered himself completely fluent in contained anything like that, not any more.

A long time ago, when spring was first flowering into barbarous summer - it was the first summer of his life he had ever really suffered from, his first summer that far south in America - when the corn which bordered the long, lonely roads was glowing gold, growing until it ruptured the seams of its caul, when the first swallow nests were coming up abandoned in the long violet shadows of the rafters, and the sun grew heavy, rosy and slow, in the barren yard of the fort he was delivered to one brilliant and uncomfortably warm morning, amongst the milling men with their luggage and rough manners and ostentatious guns, he saw it. It was impossible to not see. It had no face.

He discerned instantly it was young, somewhat small, compact, strong, physically, particularly in its trunk and arms, and that it was not quite right - it weaved a little as it stood, it generally shied from the friendly overtures made to it, its gestures when it made them were overlarge and approximate - and, as he would come to see, it absolutely would not be seen - but that was all. He could not even estimate its sex, and it disturbed him.

He shook hands with his colleagues, each in turn, and introduced himself by his profession, as he had been instructed to do, and smiled winningly, and spoke beautifully, offered his fine cigarettes, offered insincere and tasteful compliments, showed his beautiful clothes and beautiful manners, and each seemed suitably impressed with him, but that one...

It sat aside, outside the throng of guffawing men, on the earth, in the soil, in a bed of threadbare daisies growing against the hip of the dilapidated barn they were expected to inhabit, looking in its rubber vestments very peculiar, very unpleasant, and it watched.

When he approached, it looked up at him, but did not stand - did not seem to even consider intercepting the open palm he offered. It would only look at him.

He was proud. This rebuff, though he intuited unintentional, burned him as plain disdain could not.

He withdrew his hand. He found a cigarette in his breast pocket, arranged it and his mouth around his gritted teeth into a charming smile, nodded to it, and found some inane current of conversation to cover his retreat, to conceal him. It was his specialty, after all.


	2. Serpentskirt

Its room, he observed his first foray across base the balmy evening of his arrival, from the barred window set in the ceiling like in a prison, was barren compared to his, compared to any other of their associates; the cracked and discolored concrete walls and floor uncovered, the bare bulb greasy and dull, hanging low like a man in a noose. There was no furniture, no table and chair as the other rooms boasted, certainly none of the elegant trapperies he had requested dress his quarters. It looked so hard, so bare and dirty. It looked like the underside of a stone.

It had brought with it only an uncovered wooden crate of dingy metal jetsam, which it had not moved from where it had been deposited in the center of the room, and arranged on the shabby shelf set into the wall, an ax and a tiny pink purse embroidered with a daisy.

He wondered if it was some kind of pervert.

It had been sitting up against the crate, turning over some heavy lead trash in its hands - he thought it might have been the throat of a faucet - and as he watched, it rolled onto its hand and knees, crawled beneath the skeleton of the bed, and with its wiggling boots protruding from beneath, it began to speak to itself - to babble, really. The sounds it made were more like the gurgle of a raven than something a person would produce.

The spy hung on his cigarette. Somehow, the antics of the thing set him deeply ill at ease. He could compose no plausible interpretation of them. They seemed deviant. He didn't care to see more.

His colleagues were almost banal in comparison to the thing in the mask - rude, loud, vulgar, cheap, drunken, to be certain - they sat up in chairs, smoking or consuming snacks, writing papers, reading, dozing in their beds which had mattresses, sheets, clean pillows and quilts - it was a relief to see the naked faces, gray eyes and brown, hard jaws and stingy mouths, ugly but completely ordinary men invested in their environments, present in their bodies.

He liked it - to see through what he saw.

He watched the doctor fade away at the infirmary desk around midnight and elected to return to his room (satisfied to see it was by far the most beautiful, best furnished and most comfortable) and there he sat up, drinking good wine, and thought for a while about the way the thing had looked at him - something was wrong with it - something worse than impertinence.

He heard in the morning it had attacked the doctor, arriving in time to observe from the door that slangy little American lout firmly planted before the thing, insisting in his homely patois that it was only frightened at being instructed to undress, it "didn't mean no harm."

The doctor, nursing a contusion on his cheek the exact color of a ripe black plum, seemed somber but tolerant, and permitted the laborer to lead the shuddering rubber-thing away, past the spys shoulder, and the spy snickered. He almost pitied the man that aligned himself with that monster.


	3. Tishbite

!cw explicit gore

It was a monster.

He was not ashamed of the apparent weakness of his stomach - there were war veterans there, witnesses to real atrocity which balked at its bloodlust.

It barreled into combat as if it had been shot into it; heedless, wild, armed with an awful slipshod construction which to the spy resembled nothing so much as some pagan fetish which it put into the enemy team to breath out, it seemed, their screams.

If its limb was shattered - and it was - it could be seen carrying it, enduring its weight as it threw itself bodily onto the backs of its opponents. It put its ax into tender necks and stomachs like a spoon into a teacup. If its fists had not been occupied by ax or the trash dragon, the spy thought it would run on all fours.

He heard it had eaten the offal of the opponent spy, hot and raw from the body on its haunches like an animal, but he decided that was little more than a grim fairy story composed by the sensationalistic and eager (idiotic) youth who recounted it.

He had personally, however, witnessed it dismembering the opponent doctor - the poor man, left defenseless after his elephantine companion was cooked alive - he saw it part his arms from his trunk, open the thin soft backs of his legs - it _giggled_ - it stood a while, then, to observe the slurred and sodden pleas the man emitted with its head set at an avian tilt - and then, it simply left him, rolling like larvae in the soil which was tacky with his blood, his thin white brow anointed with black ash.

To put the wretch out of his misery would have betrayed the spys position, so he did not.

The spy lingered only a moment - just a moment - he had just wanted to see if it would look back, if it would even look back at what it had done - he stood at the threshold and saw it standing still, swallowed in the crush of intense sunlight, its hands upheld - the spy thought it was trying to climb the air until he saw the butterfly.

He heard the firefight which was occurring, very far away, sufficiently distant that he discern beneath it the uttering of the wind in the fields.

Standing still, the fire-thing seemed only a grotesque idol, stones and wood, Robin Goodfellow, and the spy saw the white cabbage butterfly contemplating it, arranging her wings like the voluminous white skirts of a wedding gown in the patient cup of its palm, and then she descended its finger like a drop of milk onto the throne of the daisytop, and for a while, it looked.


End file.
